Margaret Woodrow Wilson

Who was Margaret Woodrow Wilson?

Margaret Woodrow Wilson was a daughter of President Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Louise Axson. Wilson had two sisters, Jessie W. Wilson and Eleanor R. Wilson. After her mother's death in 1914 she served as the First Lady of the United States until Wilson's second marriage in 1915.

Wilson sang and made several recordings around 1918. In 1938 she travelled to the ashram of Sri Aurobindo in Puducherry, India, where she chose to stay for the rest of her life; six years later she died there from a kidney infection. She was later known in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as 'Nistha'. Sri Aurobindo gave her this name after she became a member of the Ashram; the word is Sanskrit for "sincerity." She and scholar Joseph Campbell edited the English translation of the classical work on the Hindu mystic, Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Swami Nikhilananda, which was published in 1942, by Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York.

In her father's last will, he left her an annuity of $2500 annually as long as that amount did not exceed one-third of the annual income of his estate.